Evolutionary distance measures provide a way of identifying and organizing related organisms by comparing their genomic sequences. Techniques that quantify the level of similarity between deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences are useful in our efforts to decipher the genetic code in which they are written. In some examples, the evolutionary distance separating two genomic sequences can be estimated by first aligning the sequences then comparing the aligned sequences. This preliminary aligning step may impose a large computational burden.
In some examples, massively parallel DNA sequencing uses automated, high-throughput technologies that produce a large amount of sequence data. It is useful to have efficient techniques for classifying and organizing genomic sequences such that they may be quickly identified and retrieved.